a secret for you
Dear Reader,
As we become acquainted, it seems wise to tell you a little about myself. I have had so much trouble keeping secrets. Not other people's, no, those I can carry to the grave. But I have a chronic condition where I can't shut up about myself. I need the world to know me at all given points of time. My journal too is a pretty book that's hardly filled and thumbed through, and the few times I have resorted to writing things, it has often been in preparation to structure an idea or a thought or an argument in my head that I anyway would relay to my friends or my therapist soon after the journal session. Only a means to an end. I have spent much of my life looking at the world, and speaking back to it. I can't perceive it as it is, there's always an urge I have of rearranging an experience and interpreting it back to the world in whatever form available to me. For a long time, I did this with a camera, and that urge to archive experiences in my mind with photographs has only faded a smidge.
Sometimes it's stupid, sometimes it's unwarranted. But I have come to think of it as necessary. I am approaching my mid 20's now and I think about how memory is terribly fickle. I remember so little about my life, especially about my childhood. There's also a good chunk of a year in my undergrad that I hardly remember because I was deeply depressed and fucked up. When I read memoirs, I'm always surprised by the clarity of the memories people have about their younger selves. I don't remember my life unless I cherry-picked a story to narrate to someone, unless it was photographed by someone or myself, unless I texted it to my friends. It's a terrible habit, that I let some things slip by so easily.
I am afraid of forgetting my grandmother. I am also afraid of writing about her, of talking about her with the honesty that this demands from me. I am afraid that the moment I make this a story - a subject, a dynamic, a conflict, a resolution and some familial love, she will be gone. Being remembered is also a way of leaving.
Here's what I remember from the funeral:
1) nobody told me that her body was in a clear casket right outside the front door, past the gate. nobody told us and we walked in two steps before
2) my father stood still in front of the casket, his back concaving and shaking a moment later. his plaid shirt like a schoolboy uniform
3) the heat of his back when i pressed my pain against it to feel the sobs through him. i put my bag down. we had traveled for 7 hours in that car, much of it driven by my father. i was so tired
4) there wasn't a single tissue around. my grandmother's sister comes out the front door and whispers my dad's name, and i cry and i cry and i cry because how could this have happened
5) there are people around us, people who are seated in chairs and have been here all morning, maybe even the very early morning hours when my grandmother died. i don't remember their faces, and i hope they don't remember mine at that moment
6) my grandmother has always been a small woman. she had waded through and conquered the world in a body of 5 feet and 1 inch perhaps. in the years leading up to her death, she had shrunk into herself. her body contracted and compacted. her joints hurt every hour of the day and she made tea every morning and evening for herself and her husband. it hurt to bend her fingers, she used to tell me over the phone that she'd have to unlock and click on my contact to call. the day she died was the smallest i had ever seen her.
7) the large clear casket was made of plastic, or glass, i don't know. it distorted her body a little, her face too big and her skin smudged and robbed of life.
8) i didn't want to touch her. they pulled her out of the clear casket, and did a ritual from my culture. we were supposed to touch her feet, maybe to take her blessings. i touched my mother's arm instead, while my mother touched my grandmother's feet. i knew even then in my white-numb brain that i never wanted to feel the cold on her skin with my own fingertips
9) they tied her body to an elaborate arrangement of wooden bars. she would be lowered into the grave in a sitting position, because that is what our culture demands of us. she is adorned in banana leaves and flowers, so many flowers. they place her on a small bus. i sit in the bus, on a long seat on the side and look out the gaping space where the bus door was meant to be. my brother, my father, i and a dead body ride the bus
10) when the grave is filled with dirt, we pour coconut water and place flowers and a plate of kheer, her favorite dessert on her grave. i go to my grandfather's grave, two lines above hers, and put my hands together. i wasn't there for his funeral that was held one and a half month before this. i want to focus, i want there to be meaning in this moment of standing over two people whose blood and neurons and memories are in me but all i can think about is the telephone tower that was blocking the sunset above the graveyard
11) there isn't anything else really. my grandmother's sister tells me i can call her whenever i feel like calling my grandmother. she says something rather sexist just half an hour later, so that never happened. the women of the house split the jewelry a few months later, and my mother keeps whatever is supposed to be my share because i don't want it yet. i try to make it a habit to call my grandfather, a man unmoored but too proud and bound by his ego to admit it, but i don't have much patience for a man who never learnt the value of his wife
12) i will always remember the winter sun of my last year in college, the itchy grass beneath my thighs and the half eaten orange on top of my thigh as i bit into a slice and told my grandmother that the weather is lovely, my studies are going well and im doing very well. i never lied to her, i hope she knew that
13) i get into my dream grad school, and i realize that every milestone in my life will be punctuated by her absence and a phone call that can never take place again
P.S - This is my first newsletter. I have a problem, like I said earlier, of wanting to be seen and heard always but just this once, I want to try keeping this a secret from everyone that I know. For now, it's just you & I. I hope you're well, and I hope you make lovely memories this week.